The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  He leaned forward, his eyes nearly popping through their spectacle lenses. “Mr. Grant, you must understand that the history of Orangefield, for the most part, is the history of Samhain. He’s been here at least since the early 1940s, and possibly earlier. My own theory is that he was here long before that, but not very active. Much of volume three will concern this prequel era, as well as more recent manifestations.”

  “When I was a kid there were so-called Sammy sightings, but we never took it very seriously—”

  “You should have! He’s been very crafty, and very selective. If he hasn’t come much to the attention of the police in all these years, think of how sly he is.”

  The boy looked pretty sly himself, entertaining himself, Grant thought, with private ghoulish fantasies.

  The boy looked at him boldly, and leaned even closer.

  “You do know who Samhain is, don’t you?”

  “The Lord of the Dead? By the way, what do you like to be called: Tom? Thomas?”

  “Thomas, Jr.,” would be fine.

  “We’ll keep it at Thomas, if it’s all right with you.”

  The boy nodded. “And Samhain is not merely ‘The Lord of the Dead.’ He was, first and foremost, a Celtic figure. The common conception was that, on All Hallows Eve, he had the power to bring the dead back to life for that one evening. But this is a gross simplification. The word Samhain was originally dedicated to a festival, not to a god. To the Celts, the festival of Samhain celebrated the end of one year and the beginning of the next — in essence, the death of one cycle and, hopefully, the beginning of a new one. For that one evening, October 31st, the spirits of all those who died the previous year would roam the earth. The Celts sought to ward them off with offerings of food and drink. They also maintained hilltop sacrificial sites, where animals and humans would be burned alive. This was all in hopes that the ground would renew after the winter and guarantee good crops in the new year.”

  The boy’s eyes were nearly on fire with excitement. Grant realized that he hadn’t taken any notes; he badly wanted a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the boy’s mother once again stationed in the entryway to the room, hugging herself.

  “The Romans adopted many of the Samhain festivities, incorporating it into one of their own holidays; later in the 9th century Pope Gregory IV tried to replace it altogether with All Saints Day. But before All Saints Day came All Souls Day, so the idea of the Day of Death remained. And eventually the ritual Samhain became the figure Samhain, the Lord of the Dead who ruled over what eventually evolved into Halloween. There were some French influences, too …” The boy waved his hand in dismissal.

  “And Samhain ended up in Orangefield?” Grant led.

  The boy jumped up, startling both Grant and his mother in the entryway, who flinched. “Yes! But we don’t know how, or why. Not yet, anyway. I intend to find out. But that isn’t the greatest mystery, or danger, with Samhain …”

  Grant waited, but the boy merely sat down, drawing the portfolio off the coffee table and holding it on his lap with his hands folded on top of it.

  “That would be …?” Grant, after a few moments of silence.

  The mother had moved off; Grant could hear her steps receding quickly down the hallway into the back of the house; there came a muffled slam of a door.

  The boy shook his head. Grant noticed that his hands were trembling.

  The boy was staring at Grant intently. The detective had seen it before, in suspects: the need to talk battling mightily with the fear of doing so.

  “Are you afraid?” Grant asked.

  The boy made no movement, then nodded curtly.

  Grant got up, stiffly, making a noise. “Then I’ll be going. Thanks for your time—”

  The boy was at his elbow instantly. “Please stay,” he said in a fierce whisper.

  Grant settled back down onto the uncomfortable sofa, pushing himself back over the slippery cushions, and put a blank look on his face.

  “There’s another one,” the boy said, barely loud enough to be heard.

  “Another what?” Grant offered.

  “Samhain, for all his power over the dead, is only a servant. He only does what he’s told to do …”

  Grant waited. The boy’s mother was back; Grant heard her crying out in the hallway. Then her voice, muffled, frightened, called the boy’s name: “Thomas, Jr.” She pronounced it “Toe-mass,” and there was pleading in it.

  “That’s all I can tell you, detective.” The boy got up, the portfolio once more in place under his arm.

  Grant rose, too. “If I come back after reading your father’s first volume, will you show me the second? We’ll talk some more?”

  The boy turned at the entryway. “Come back then,” he said. Then he bowed and turned away.

  His steps echoed down the hallway.

  Grant was prepared to let himself out, but the boy’s mother was there when he left the living room. She grabbed his arm.

  “Detective—”

  Grant’s cell phone went off, and he reached into his jacket pocket for it, rooting past his cigarette pack and other detritus. He drew it out and turned it on.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Mrs. Reynolds.

  “Grant here,” he said into the phone, and listened. He kept listening, as he went numb.

  “My God,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was time for a monkey conference.

  The concept was simple and elegant. And it worked. It had worked for Marcia Bright’s family when she was growing up, and she had adopted it for her own husband and daughter, with similar results.

  This was how it worked: everyone in the family was given a stuffed animal, a monkey of their own choosing, and whenever something needed to be discussed as a family, a monkey conference was called. Everyone arrived at the kitchen table with their monkey (which made it official) and the conference began.

  This time, there were only two participants at the monkey conference. Gina had been put to bed, and Marcia herself, for the first time, forgot to bring her stuffed monkey — the same sock creature she had used as a child — to the table.

  “Marcia, there’s nothing wrong with her,” Ted began. His own stuffed animal sat on the floor next to his chair.

  “The doctor gave her a thorough check-up,” Marcia agreed.

  “Maybe you—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, Ted! Just because you sleep like a rock, and haven’t heard any of these noises at night, or during the daytime because you’re at work.”

  “Nothing happened last weekend while I was home — though, if you remember, you had me up all night listening.”

  She said nothing.

  He tried to remain reasonable. “Do you really think our house is suddenly … haunted? And that these … playmates of hers are real?”

  She glared at him. “Don’t patronize me.”

  He threw up his hands. “We’ve lived here seven years, and now the house is possessed?”

  “It’s not the house — it’s Gina. And it’s Corrie Phaeder’s fault.”

  There came a faint sound from above, and they paused; Ted followed his wife’s eyes to the ceiling while they both listened: a creak.

  “House settling for the night,” Ted offered.

  “Maybe,” Marcia answered.

  “Look,” Ted said, continuing their conversation, “what exactly is it you want me to do? Hire an exorcist?”

  “I want you to talk to the police, and make them do something about our neighbor.” There was steel in her voice.

  Ted threw up his hands in exasperation. “Do what? Put a stake through his heart? Shoot him with a silver bullet? Drive him out of town with torches? How ’bout if I talk to this weirdo, man to man—”

  Something about the way his wife was looking at him, some seriousness of purpose he had never seen before, made him stop. When he spoke again his voice was filled with concern. “Marsh, are you okay?”

  His wife w
hispered hoarsely, “Don’t you hear it?”

  There was a sound, which had been building in the back of Ted’s hearing, and now rose to the forefront—a sound like a dripping of water from a great height — there was a drip, drip followed by two deep splashing sounds which was getting louder and louder—

  “What in blazes—”

  Ted rose from the kitchen table, kicking his stuffed monkey, a large brown one, aside and walking to the stairs.

  “Do you think the faucet upstairs, the shower—?

  The sound was growing and growing, way beyond what a plumbing problem would cause.

  He moved up the stairs, two at a time, Marcia close behind him.

  “What the—”

  A bright light like a strobe was flashing out from beneath their daughter’s bedroom door. As Ted reached for the knob the door flew open, blinding him.

  “Gina!” he called.

  There was no sound, and he thrust his way into the room.

  The light was instantly extinguished, and now he heard his daughter calling for him and Marcia.

  “Mommy! Daddy!”

  She was wide awake, in the middle of the rug on the floor, flopping as if riding an invisible horse. She looked in their direction but Ted could tell she couldn’t see them.

  “Mommy, make the ocean go away!”

  They heard a huge creak, like a huge wooden ship being tossed by waves; the sound of a monstrous storm, lightning and thunder and the crash of water, filled the room.

  “Mommmmeeeee!”

  Their daughter was thrown into the air, then stopped suspended about two feet above the floor; she floundered, flailing her arms and crying.

  “Mommeee! I can’t swim!”

  She began to sink toward the floor, gasping for breath as if her mouth were filling with water.

  Marcia jumped forward and grabbed her.

  “Ted!”

  He knelt beside his daughter as she was lowered to the floor, fighting for breath.

  “Ted, do something!”

  Not knowing what else to do, he put his mouth over his daughter’s and tried to push air into her lungs — to his horror her mouth felt as if it was filled with water.

  “My God, my God—”

  Gina was turning blue, convulsing, trying to fight her way to an invisible surface.

  Marcia lifted her daughter up, raising her more than two feet off the ground.

  Gina suddenly spat out, heaved like a fish and began to gulp air.

  Ted took her from his wife and held her higher.

  Something blinked in the room, shifted like a lens shutter being snapped — suddenly everything was back to normal.

  The noises disappeared like a tone arm being pulled from a phonograph record.

  Gina gave a huge, trembling sigh, and was instantly asleep.

  Ted stood in shocked silence, holding his daughter aloft as if she were a trophy, while his wife, breathing heavily, stared at him.

  He slowly lowered Gina into his wife’s arms.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I’ll talk to Phaeder,” he said.

  From somewhere far away, Corrie heard banging. He thought it was part of his dream. But there had been no sound like that the day he met Kathy Marks. It had been raining, in summer, and the clouds had just parted and everything was wet and the sky turned deep blue almost in a heartbeat. The air smelled like after-rain, fresh and dry-wet, like a curtain pulled aside from storm to calm. There was the sound of dripping water from the tree leaves.

  “You come here a lot?” he said, startling her. She was standing at the edge of the picnic area, staring at a tree, and he thought she was watching the water drip from the green leaves.

  “I don’t like Ranier Park,” she answered, after looking at him, perhaps judging him in that instant and then dismissing him.

  “I know I’m younger than you are, but—”

  “Wanted to see the freak?” she said, not turning around. He had never heard anyone speak so bitterly.

  “No. I—”

  She pointed. “That’s the tree. You can still see the mark on the branch the rope made, if you get up close.”

  He stood squinting where she indicated.

  “Do you look at it a lot?”

  She said nothing, and he turned around to go, thinking it a lost cause, until she suddenly said, her voice dropping a tone: “All the time.”

  She turned around to study him more closely. “You’re Corrie Something, right?”

  “Phaeder.”

  She nodded slowly, her eyes still on him. “Big house on Sagett River. Your father took off when you were little.”

  He didn’t know what else to say, so he shrugged and said, “That’s me.”

  “Why did you follow me here?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t give me that — I saw you following me today, and yesterday, and Thursday last week.”

  “It was Friday.”

  “It was Thursday. Think about it.” She was still frowning, her eyes looking him over like a caught bug.

  He concentrated. “You’re right, it was Thursday.”

  “No it wasn’t. It was actually Friday. I wanted to see if you would lie so I wouldn’t send you away.”

  “I—” he had no idea what to say or do.

  “I take it you’re not a big hit with the girls,” she said, and for the first time he sensed her melt a bit. The frown was gone, leaving her features smooth but blank. He wondered how pretty she would look when she smiled. She had all the right features for prettiness, but there was nothing to light them up.

  He wanted to light them up, but had no idea how to tell her that.

  “I like you,” he finally blurted out.

  The frown was back, in spades. “You’re three years younger than me,” she said, and turned to consider the oak tree again. The freshened air was turning summer warm again, the cool wet misting back to humidity. Dappled sunlight made leaf shadows race in tight circles on the ground.

  “I—strange things happen to me,” he said. “I see things, and hear things in my head.”

  She turned sharply, and now he felt as if he was being dissected. “Then you’re nuts. Or lying.”

  And then he began to cry.

  When the tears stopped, she was standing near him, staring at him in amazement. He sniffled and cleared his eyes. She held a crumpled tissue out to him.

  “Use this,” she ordered.

  He finished the job, and handled the tissue back to her. He felt as if he should leave, run away, but he was rooted to the spot by the possibility of what she would say next.

  “I never saw a fifteen year old boy cry before,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. It proves you’re not completely full of it.”

  Abruptly she turned away from him, and away from the tree, and began to walk to one of the picnic tables at the far end of the clearing.

  “Sit down. Let’s talk,” she said.

  Two hours later, they were friends.

  He told her everything, and she told him everything, even if most of it was known. When they had exhausted their obvious troubles, they talked about school, which would start again in three weeks — Kathy would be a senior, and Corrie a freshman.

  “I suggest you don’t try that crying act when you’re a frosh,” she counseled. “They’ll pound you senseless.”

  “I don’t plan on it.” He was still waiting for her first smile, though she had come close.

  “I suppose you let everything out because it was the first time you could. Like it was all bottled up, the cork waiting to pop.”

  “Something like that.”

  She looked at him closely. “I think you’ll be all right. You can always come to me if you need help. Not that I’m popular at all — they call me Bookworm. But that’s okay, because I want to be a librarian anyway after I get out of school. I’ve started looking at colleges that teach library science.”

 
; The prospect of losing this friend he had just found cast Corrie into gloom.

  “Hey, it’s all right! It’s a long way’s away. And what about you? What do you want to do?”

  “I like photography.”

  She nodded approval. “That might get you out of this town, which is what you need to do. Me too. Who knows, maybe we’ll leave together.”

  “Fine with me.”

  And then she smiled, which made her face flush like an angel.

  And he fell in love with her.

  Eventually, she fell in love with him. It was almost a year later, in the summer week before she was to leave for college, that they both admitted it.

  The afternoon started out with a picnic lunch, away from the picnic tables which were being used by a bratty group of five year olds and their parents for a birthday party. They went deeper into the back part of Ranier Park, behind the picnic area, where the ground was covered in pine needles and the trees were a forest of old Christmas against the autumn sky. They found a soft spot in a small clearing and laid out their blanket and then ate their chicken and cold potato salad and drank their ice tea in near silence.

  Something was strange. Corrie knew it. It had been building for weeks, and it had something to do with Kathy leaving. But it was more than that. When she looked at him something was different about her eyes. It was as if they had become deeper pools, pulling him in after them.

  He was afraid to touch her.

  “I’ll be home in October, for Columbus Day weekend,” she said. “Already got a bus ticket.” They were the first words she had said in an hour, and they sounded hollow.

  He nodded.

  “Someone told me to get bus tickets way in advance, ’cause the seats sell out fast, especially around holidays. I’ll probably get my Thanksgiving ticket first week I’m up there.”

  Corrie wiped his hands, put the remains of his last chicken leg into the empty bucket.

  She turned those deep pools of eyes on him.

  “I want you to be here when I come back.”

  “I will be.”

  She leaned over, pushing the bucket aside, and kissed him. “I want you to be here.”